Social Media

Edgeio - Mike's Little eBay Killer

I gotta say that I love Edgeio. Mike Arrington called me today and gave me a demo of the new classifieds service he has worked on with Keith Teare. I really can't fault it. It ties in with so much of the stuff that I've been thinking about recently - essentially that blogs are becoming the submit form for the web and that the centralized models (read: walled gardens) of old are about to be disrupted in a big way by smart aggregators. Think of Riffs vs iNods. Which will have more content - a fairly closed review site that requires a signup to post content, or an aggregator that will grab content from wherever it's created, be it on Riffs or one of the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there? Clearly, the aggregator wins - it's simply a better place to go if you want to find a review. But perhaps that's not fair. Perhaps Riffs itself is an edge feeder - another submit form that makes it easy to add your content to the network, just like YouTube makes it easy to put your videos online. In fact, I suspect that all the centralized sites will eventually be forced to either open up or become edge feeders, but we'll see.

So back to Edgeio. Essentially, Edgeio is an aggregator for classified listings. You can write a classified ad on your blog, tag it with "listing" and let Edgeio pick it up from your feed. Add a few more tags to describe your ad and Edgeio will grab those too. The service will pick up anything tagged with "listing" and obviously that raises the question of spam. But after speaking to Mike, I'm pretty sure he's on top of it. For instance, you can claim your blog on Edgeio, just like on Technorati. Claiming your blog means that you are now a "member" and your listings are considered more trustworthy. There are also automated ways to remove the worst of the spam. And then there are the user-powered methods - "report spam" buttons and the like.

And so to the interface. It's nice - simple, elegant and intuitive. There are also some nice ajaxy touches, but I don't want to go into every little detail before the launch. In the meantime, here's a tasty Edgeio screenshot to feast your eyes on:

Last of all: the business model. Unlike about 90% of the stuff that gets labelled (tagged?) Web 2.0, Edgeio actually has one. Actually it has a few, but the main monetization method appears to be sponsored listings - pay 25 cents a day to get your listing bumped up to the top. I would have been tempted to pursue a transaction-based model (ie. you take a cut from every sale), but I can see why Edgeio isn't taking that path for now - handling transactions is a huge job and requires a reputation system, among other things. (And if Edgeio did build a reputation system, I'm pretty sure it would be portable).

Calling Edgeio an eBay killer is probably a bit hyperbolic, but I do think it points the way to how decentralization will undermine the centralized business models of old. Your little walled garden will never be as large, rich and varied as the content that exists out on the open web. And likewise, your suite of me-too applications will never be as good as a series of highly specialized web services loosely woven by APIs and RSS feeds. Which is all a roundabout way of saying: Edgeio rocks! Good luck to you, Mike, not that you'll need it.

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